I’m sure I’m borrowing this reasoning from somewhere, but can’t remember where.

Since I’m perhaps the only religious conservative around, I was conversing with some fellow students this evening, and when politics came up, a fellow eventually asked what I thought of universal healthcare. I said that I was against it. He gave me this look of “how can you possibly be so meanhearted?” and asked if I was OK with people dying for no reason but lack of health insurance. I said that I’d much rather someone other than the government be responsible for helping that person. He left a bit later, and the conversation went on to other things. It left me wondering, however, if I could construct a coherent account of why I believe the way I do about social services.

I recognize that there are various pragmatic reasons why some people say that national health care will lead to worse health care, even for people of relatively modest means. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that, and even very good reasons are of no use if they’re unknown. So instead I’m going to talk about something I do understand a little bit, but may not be nearly as convincing – virtues. Specifically, I am against many government – and especially national government – charitable programs regardless of whether or not they would *work* as well as private ones, because they tend toward replacing positive and free virtues – specifically generosity and gratitude – with duties and rights. And even more than that, modern rhetoric downplays the duties to the point where instead of the thing itself – we have a duty to help – we assume then ignore the duty, and focus on it’s absence – greed. So instead of speaking of charity, generosity, and gratitude, we speak of rights and greed – neither of these an ennobling thing to focus on.

A liberal and I might agree that we have a duty to try to help someone who is living in poverty. Suppose he is sick. Christianity says we should get together and build, volunteer at, and donate to a clinic or hospital, buy him medicine, bring him food, and go out of our way to help him. Liberalism says we should pass a law saying that he has a right to tax funded health care, with the result that unless I happen to be employed by a governmental agency that deals with that particular kind of case, I won’t even have to really give any money – it will be automatically taken out of my paycheck so that I need never know he exists to begin with, nor who is, nor what he needs, nor what it costs.

This seems like a bad way of doing things – because it’s placing more barriers between people of good will and those we should be learning to love.